War and Peace in an Age of Ecological Conflicts

In Revue Juridique de l'Environnement, Vol.1, 2014, pp. 51-63 (Written originally as a lecture at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, Vancouver 23rd of September, 2013.)

Abstract

Let me start with the notion of “conflicts”. I think it is fair to say that about all the questions that I am going to deal with you tonight, we are divided. Not only divided among different parties, different factions, religions, ideologies, but also, and maybe more deeply, divided inside yourself. I certainly feel such a division and it is from this situation of internal conflict that I take the courage to address you tonight.
What I am going to do is to attempt at tracing with you some of the many lines of dissent that today constitute the warring parties whose disputes require new forms of political attitudes. Or rather of geo-political attitudes, provided you take the prefix “geo” in its etymological meaning of “Earth”. As we will see, geopolitics is not about human politics overlaid on the static frame of the Earth, but politics about contradictory portions, visions, aspects of the Earth and its contending humans. Such is the new situation for which we don’t seem to be well equipped intellectually